Encapsulation
by Eliot Rosewater
Summary: "There was before, which he usually didn't remember, and then there was after, which he would forget soon enough." The Winter Soldier followed every order he was given to the letter. With one exception. [Decompilation]


**In computer programming, encapsulation is the inclusion of one component within an object such that the included component is not apparent.**

* * *

_There was before, which he usually didn't remember, and then there was after, which he would forget soon enough. He liked being this way. The binary nature of his thoughts felt right. It made sense to him regardless of the circumstances._

_ Before and after. _

_ Black and white. _

_ Good and bad. _

_ Yes and no. _

_ Cold and not-so-cold. _

_ Point and shoot. _

_ Unfortunately, it wasn't always this way in his head. _

* * *

The Winter Soldier was at his best under clearly defined conditions. Did things _actually_ make sense to him? Could he even think? They all knew he functioned based on very strict logic, but was there still someone in there calling the shots? Support teams often wondered this about the Soldier. They wondered about the asset often. They'd wait for extraction in a safe house with the fist of HYDRA and wonder.

Brock Rumlow was one of those people that wondered. On his first mission as support for the asset, the Winter Soldier was tasked with executing a physicist. The target had been one of those crotchety, old, genius types. Rumlow had sat around for _hours_ with the team while the Soldier simply laid there with his eye shoved into the scope of his rifle waiting for the shot to line up. Talk about patience.

That rifle! The thing was a marvel of craftsmanship. There probably wasn't another being on the planet capable of wielding that thing with as much accuracy and deadly precision as the Winter Soldier. Sometimes they would deploy the asset with inferior materiel on purpose, just to see what he'd do with it. And he _never _disappointed. There was a very popular story among the STRIKE teams about the asset neutralizing a target in eastern Europe with nothing but a pillow. The goddamn Winter Soldier killing a person in a _pillow fight_—this was the stuff of legends.

During that first mission, it was the asset's job to kill the target. The team would make it look like some laboratory accident afterwards. Staging a crime scene was something the Soldier knew how to do himself, of course. But for whatever reason, the higher ups hadn't wanted the Soldier to enter the house.

It hadn't been Rumlow's place to question the order, though the thought did cross his mind as he wondered about the asset afterward. Certainly the Soldier wasn't going to ask why he wasn't the one staging the scene as he had so many times before. Rumlow had only heard the Winter Soldier speak a handful of times before, and it was never for pleasantries or curiosity that his voice would be summoned. Most of the time, the Soldier only spoke up to answer a direct question; sometimes an order would require verbal communication. But other than that, the only noises the Soldier ever made were the primal screams that involuntarily crawled clear of his throat when his precious few memories were being zapped out of his head.

On that first mission, the Winter Soldier shot both the target and the target's wife—collateral; within acceptable parameters of the mission. After that, he had sat up, stripped his rifle, reassembled it, and stood at parade rest. Rumlow told him to stay in the area and out of sight until they were done. The Soldier followed the order to the letter. As he had every time thereafter with one memorable exception.

* * *

_ Sometimes, unbidden, his thought processes would get all mucked up. He didn't like this; it made his head hurt. All at once the mission parameters would blur, or he'd forget where and when he was. He felt separate. Disconnected. His heart pounded when it shouldn't. Terrible, foreign anxiety that belonged to someone else would lock him in its grip. Things didn't exist in pairs anymore. _

_ No more before and after, only now. _

_ No more black and white, only vivid, painful red. _

_ No more good and bad, only point of view._

_ No more yes and no, only maybe. _

_ No more cold and not-so-cold, only temperateness. _

_ Point and shoot._

_ He didn't want to._

* * *

The first (and only) time the Soldier didn't follow a direct order was nearly as legendary as the pillow fight assassination. The asset had been deployed solo; the mission was simple enough. It was meant to look like an accident, and that was something their enforcer had become quite good at doing. The real beauty of the Soldier was found in his sharpshooting abilities but Rumlow had come to admire the theatrics of the staged kills in time. The Soldier could be an incredibly convincing actor when someone ordered him to be.

Anyway, the mission was only expected to take eight hours. It was routine, really. If the files were to be believed, this was child's play for the asset; trivial compared to other assignments he'd been given. One could argue that they didn't even need someone of the Soldier's ability to take out the target. (Again, that wasn't Rumlow's place to speak up.) The hours had ticked by and the Soldier still hadn't returned to base. Some of the men on the extraction team had begun to panic. They were all convinced that they were going to be slaughtered for losing the Soldier. And honestly? They probably would have been right.

When time finally ran out on the mission, Rumlow led part of the team out to hunt the asset down—the rest of them stayed behind in case he turned up late. (As if. He wasn't late. Ever.) They traced the path that the Soldier had been told to take. There wasn't any sign of him, as there shouldn't have been. The scene of the crime was buzzing with authorities—no need to worry that the mission hadn't been achieved. It appeared that everything had all gone according to plan right up until after the kill. All they had to worry about was finding him. And _fuck_ if Rumlow didn't appreciate the full magnitude of the task.

Track down the Winter Soldier, the deadliest assassin in history that most of the world didn't even believe existed?

Yeah, just as soon as Rumlow got the pigs to stop flying.

* * *

_ What had he done? Why had he done that? Where did the safety of yes and no go? This wasn't black, and it wasn't white. Good and bad? Forget about it. Where did all of the questions come from? This had never happened before._

_ What did he do now? And what was the meaning of the lightening-fast beat of his heart and thinness of the air in his lungs? Was that bile rising in the back of his throat? Why did his head hurt so badly? _

_ He wanted to run away. From what, he didn't know. He wanted. _

_ Point and shoot._

_ For how much longer?_

* * *

Rumlow was chasing a ghost, almost literally. It would have been so much easier to find him if they knew anything at all about the guy. Outside of logic and the conditioning that had gone into making the Winter Soldier, no one on the team knew jack about where or what the asset would do in the absence of a mission. They all wondered again who he had been—because before he was the Winter Soldier, he had to have been a person, right? Where would the man that the asset was built in the ruins of go?

Their minds only wandered so far. If one _really_ wanted to know who lived in the Winter Soldier's body before the software was installed so to speak, they needed only ask. There was a very thorough history on the asset. Everything about him was documented and tracked. God bless the meticulous note-taking of scientists and their experiments. Rumlow knew that the face in question used to belong to the guy in the history books, the one famous for being Captain America's right hand. Well, _left _hand since all the pictures and painted murals of those ridiculous Commandos seemed to depict Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes to the left of the captain. And wasn't that just fucking ironic.

There were times when the men used to ask the asset questions about the man that used to live in his body. They'd sit around waiting for some arbitrary time reference and someone would say, "Soldier, do you who Sergeant Barnes was?"

The answer was always the same: "Negative."

For some reason, this was always hilarious. Rumlow laughed more than his fair share of times. They'd ask him if he'd ever been to Brooklyn in New York, and he'd always say he didn't know. They'd ask him if he ever knew a man named Steven Rogers, and he'd always say no. Not everyone read the extensive files kept on him, but if they wanted to know the basic facts, they could be found. If a team knew that there was an assignment coming up involving the Winter Soldier, they'd read up in old history books—and later, on the internet—on Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes just so that they could ask the Soldier about the man he didn't remember that he used to be. Over time, it made Rumlow sick. Later, it didn't make him feel anything.

Everything that was known about that man, however, would not help them find the Winter Soldier now. The asset had abandoned protocol. He'd simply skipped out on returning to base. Eventually, Rumlow knew, he would have to come back or risk death. The conditioning he'd been put through always ensured that he would have to seek out aid before long. He did not come equipped with the ability to take care of himself for extended periods of time. What they really needed to worry about was finding the Soldier before someone else did.

* * *

_ Something was telling him to go home. Where was that? Where was home? What was home to a being such as himself? Was home the darkness that followed the flash of cold? Was home wherever he next found himself awakening? Was home a place he had been before? _

_ There were too many unpaired thoughts pushing on the backs of his eyes. It made everything a wash of tumultuous colors, variance so large he was drowning in it. Yes was gone from this place. No was not an option. Nothing had any boundaries anymore. He didn't think home could be in such a messy place._

_ Point and shoot._

_ Perhaps it was better that way._

* * *

It took them several hours to find the Soldier, but in the end, they _did_ find him. Rumlow found him on a rooftop, the highest in the area. Figured. The Soldier was first and foremost a sniper, and he liked to have the high ground. Up on the dilapidated roof, the Soldier was curled into himself the way he had been trained not to do. This was not the Winter Soldier, Rumlow had realized immediately. This was the remains of the man who lived in that body first. He was tucked away in a corner and shaking the way he did from the aftershocks when they wiped his mind clean.

"Mission report," Rumlow had said.

Through heaving breaths, the asset said, "Targets neutralized. Mission complete."

"Then why the hell didn't you come back?"

Nothing. Just cracked breaths and hiccups.

"Soldier, why the hell didn't you come back?"

"Flying cars," he had said.

"What?"

"I saw . . . flying cars."

Rumlow tried to make sense of the words. Flying fucking cars? The mission had involved the Soldier blowing out a vehicle. Was that what he meant about flying cars? Explosions? Jeez, maybe they should lay off frying the guy's brain if he thought flying and exploding were interchangeable.

The Soldier had said, "I've seen . . . _things_ blow up like that. Before. I've seen. Flying cars, too."

Rumlow didn't like the sound of that, the sound of _before_. There was no before for the Soldier. His time began when his temperature hit the normal range as he was coming out of cryostasis. There wasn't supposed to be anything _before_ that for the Soldier. For whatever reason, though, Rumlow found he couldn't strike the asset for its act of rebellion. It didn't feel right. The man before him was hardly the Winter Soldier. To Rumlow, that man looked an awful lot like what he would expect the microscopic shards of Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes that couldn't be removed to look like. These were the pieces of humanity that, no matter what the scientists and Zola did, could not be extracted. These were the pieces of humanity that they had been forced to bury under years of conditioning and programming so that they would have an efficient weapon. These were the pieces of humanity that made it necessary to shock the Soldier's brain into oblivion after each mission to ensure that they didn't resurface.

Rumlow was well-versed in dealing with the Winter Soldier. But he was not facing the Soldier now. And as much as he wished it wasn't there, there was a part of him that hesitated to discipline the asset as he was now. If the Soldier ever disobeyed an order or threw a mission in the toilet, there were very strict and distinct instructions on how to handle the situation. _This _wasn't the asset though. _This_, Rumlow had come to realize, was Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes. And he couldn't be held to the same code of conduct as the Winter Soldier. (Rumlow couldn't put a fucking beat down on a goddamn American hero.)

Pulling the man up by the prosthetic arm, Rumlow said, "We have to return to base."

And when they did—terribly, horribly late—Rumlow steeled himself. He had to write exactly what happened in the report. The whole way back to base the team was throwing glances at the Soldier. He was erratic and unstable and that scared them. Would he fly off the handle and start snapping necks? Or worse, would he start crying? Nothing about the Winter Soldier ever really phased Rumlow or the team—well, maybe that dead-eyed stare. Though the body and the face were the same, everyone could sense the minute change in him. Maybe they were thinking of Sergeant Barnes too; thinking of how they were asking the Soldier questions about the man that once was only hours earlier. Did he remember that? God, Rumlow hoped he didn't remember that. This was all somehow _different_.

When the technicians read the report not long after, they did what they were supposed to do. It was the longest they had ever let the current run through his body. Rumlow tried to leave the room before it started, but the screams chased him out the door. They had to do it. There was no room for humanity in the Winter Soldier. The sergeant _needed _to be buried under all that static. It was kinder, Rumlow reasoned. Better for the Winter Soldier to serve HYDRA than for Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes to come back to life. He'd be all kinds of messed up anyway.

Rumlow later heard that, when all that humanity had been locked up inside the Winter Soldier's iron self-control, the Soldier couldn't even walk from the aftershocks. They had to carry him back to the prep room. No doubt that after what had happened that night—_flying cars?—_the Soldier would be in for a very long hibernation.

* * *

_ He didn't know how long it had been since his last mission. He never did. They told him that they were glad to see him again and that it had been a long time. They told him his target was Fury, Nicholas J. _

_ Point and shoot. _

_ This was the last time._


End file.
